Professor Norman is a former Director of Synchotron Radiation, Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, Daresbury Laboratory . He was a visiting Professor in Surface Science at the University of Liverpool

Since 2005 he has been an independent member of the United Kingdom's Rare Breeding Birds Panel and he is a member of the RSPB Council, and Chairman of the Merseyside Ringing Group. He is an honorary research associate of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, spending up to a month each year at their Powdermill Nature Reserve.

He served on the council of English Nature from 1996-2002 (and in September 2000 became interim acting chairman for six months). He has been chairman of the Cheshire Wildlife Trust and a member of the Editorial Board for Ornithology's journal Ringing and Migration. He was the founder chairman of the Mersey Estuary Conservation Group and Research Committee of the Liverpool Bay Wader Study Group.

In 2002 he was awarded the British Trust for Ornithology's Bernard Tucker Medal "for his outstanding scientific contributions in surveying, nest-recording and ringing birds".

• BTO Migration Atlas (texts on Common Tern, Wood Warbler & Chaffinch
• Birds in Cheshire and Wirral, Liverpool University Press, 2008 ISBN 978-1-84631-152-9
• On behalf of the Cheshire and Wirral Ornithological Society

Papers

• Various, on waders on the Mersey Estuary, Fieldfares, Common Terns, Little Terns, Wood Warblers, Firecrests and Bramblings